Virtual Worlds – Freelancer (2003)

“Freelancer was created by digital Anvil and published in 2003 by Microsoft. It is a Space Sim game that has defined the genre and is revered by much of its community. it has a strong modding community that has slowly waned over time and has many excellent mods, the most notable of which are Discovery, Crossfire, Freeworlds and many others.

Originally I wanted to create a much different piece to capture the feeling of the system showcasing the ruins of Freeport 7, the destruction of which initiated the start of the plot.

However upon replaying the game, I noticed that such a feeling would not convey the atmosphere of the system but would instead focus too much upon the path of the plot which was not the best portion of the game and secondly was not the focus on the project which was to convey the loneliness of the system and the ever-present danger of the system.“

I instead went for a much more atmospheric approach. I took a couple hundred screenshots and looked at Chris Robert’s more recent project, Star Citizen to imagine how a more realistic freelancer would look.

I then decided upon a singe section of space a long run to the gate in the background plagued by pirates and fraught with dangers including a large amount of radiation in the neighboring green nebula.

Despite the danger the route is constantly traversed by NPC convoys to the neighboring planet Juno.

I wanted at first to show a whisp of the planet poking through but as the nebulae in the game more closely resembled pea soup(this is in fact the trope that began that particular trend in more recent space sims).

One of the main things that I like about the system is that it is one of two trinary systems in vanilla(unmodded) freelancer. The other is in the same cluster of systems and only in a few places carry a atmosphere of anything other that simply ‘lost’.

This piece also game me the chance to experiment with different colors of stars. However the majority of time was spent on the background nebulae to contain the elements of the original starsphere into a new creation.

This image is not just an attempt at a tribute but an attempt to revamp the world.

I used both brushwork and fractal manipulation into the work. my favorite part is actually the bit in the lower left corner which was a bit of a happy accident as I temporarily moved a bit of nebula there and then found I liked the positioning so I left it.

The stars in the background were heavily painted and if I went back and redid the image, I would make them a bit brighter, and perhaps add a couple of identifiable stars to represent nearby systems in that direction.

Freelancer is and was one of the deciding interest in art particularly space art. it is one of my main inspirations for my work.

The game has become somewhat dated over the years but the art has not lost its beauty and I suspect that in my eyes, that it never will.